When your translator is in tears, you know you’re in trouble. This morning we met with two women, both of them survivors of rape. Both captured and violated by the Interahamwe — the FDLR militia, some of whom are former perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide. One woman was pregnant — she said that she had…
As she entered the room, my eyes froze on her scarred and disfigured face. Skin melted like a plastic mask. I winced and a pain shot through my heart. I instructed my eyes to move off of her face; but where should they go? On their own, my eyes darted to her arms bound in…
I was haunted by their faces. Renee with deep scars carved into what was once a beautiful face, eyes with a depth of sorrow I had never before witnessed and hands pink where her flesh was burned off. When the Interahamwe came, they burned her house after seven men raped her. She ran back inside…
Yesterday, at the Goma border crossing, a local Congolese official told our translator that she wanted to go through our luggage. We knew it was a shakedown, but wanted to avoid any trouble. Isaiah talked to her to try to smooth things over, so that she would let it go. And she told him, “Isaiah,…
For nine years Mama Francine (for her safety I cannot reveal her true name) has lived in the safe house in a remote and isolated area outside of Goma. For six years before that she lived at a hospital and endured surgery after surgery to repair the damage to her body caused by violent rape.…
Congo is unlike anything I have experienced. I can barely process what I have seen and heard today. The poverty and desolation are unimaginable. There is such a waste of human potential.
Yesterday we drove east from Kigali to visit the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, an extraordinary program established by Jewish philanthropist Ann Heyman as a response to helping Rwanda move forward following the horrifying genocide of the early 1990’s. While visiting the Genocide Memorial in Kigali earlier in the day, we stood in a room filled…
As we drive through plush verdant fields and towering mountains on our way to Kigali and the Congo border, we pass men, women and children walking and riding bicycles. The scenery is spectacular. Children wave with bright smiles. The women carry baskets and packages on their heads. Life seems easy, slow, peaceful. This scene is…
I met Ingrid in person in April, 2007 when she came to California for her admissions interview at Stanford University. At the time, Ingrid was 19 years old. But I had actually seen Ingrid a few years before…when as a young teenager she was prominently featured in a documentary film (brilliantly produced by Global Nomads)…
I knew I shouldn’t have gone into the room about children long before I stepped inside. It’s the last room of the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center here in Rwanda, and it’s not like the kind young man that greeted us at reception didn’t give me fair warning that it was coming. I was already in…